One of the most important issues impeding the widespread distribution of digital documents via electronic commerce is the current lack of protection of the intellectual property rights of content owners during the distribution and use of those digital documents. Efforts to resolve this problem have been termed “Intellectual Property Rights Management” (“IPRM”), “Digital Property Rights Management” (“DPRM”), “Intellectual Property Management” (“IPM”), “Rights Management” (“RM”), and “Electronic Copyright Management” (“ECM”).
A document, as the term is used herein, is any unit of information subject to distribution or transfer, including but not limited to correspondence, books, magazines, journals, newspapers, other papers, software, photographs and other images, audio and video clips, and other multimedia presentations. A document may be embodied in printed form on paper, as digital data on a storage medium, or in any other known manner on a variety of media.
In the world of printed documents, a work created by an author is usually provided to a publisher, which formats and prints numerous copies of the work. The copies are then sent by a distributor to bookstores or other retail outlets, from which the copies are purchased by end users.
While the low quality of copying and the high cost of distributing printed material have served as deterrents to the illegally copying of most printed documents, it is far too easy to copy, modify, and redistribute unprotected electronic documents. Accordingly, some method of protecting electronic documents is necessary to make it harder to illegally copy them. This will serve as a deterrent to copying, even if it is still possible, for example, to make hardcopies of printed documents and duplicate them the old-fashioned way.
With printed documents, there is an additional step of digitizing the document before it can be redistributed electronically; this serves as a deterrent. Unfortunately, it has been widely recognized that there is no viable way to prevent people from making unauthorized distributions of electronic documents within current general-purpose computing and communications systems such as personal computers, workstations, and other devices connected over local area networks (LANs), intranets, and the Internet. Many attempts to provide hardware-based solutions to prevent unauthorized copying have proven to be unsuccessful.
Two basic schemes have been employed to attempt to solve the document protection problem: secure containers and trusted systems.
A “secure container” (or simply an encrypted document) offers a way to keep document contents encrypted until a set of authorization conditions are met and some copyright terms are honored (e.g., payment for use). After the various conditions and terms are verified with the document provider, the document is released to the user in clear form. Commercial products such as IBM's Cryptolopes and InterTrust's Digiboxes fall into this category. Clearly, the secure container approach provides a solution to protecting the document during delivery over insecure channels, but does not provide any mechanism to prevent legitimate users from obtaining the clear document and then using and redistributing it in violation of content owners' intellectual property.
Cryptographic mechanisms are typically used to encrypt (or “encipher”) documents that are then distributed and stored publicly, and ultimately privately deciphered by authorized users. This provides a basic form of protection during document delivery from a document distributor to an intended user over a public network, as well as during document storage on an insecure medium.
In the “trusted system” approach, the entire system is responsible for preventing unauthorized use and distribution of the document. Building a trusted system usually entails introducing new hardware such as a secure processor, secure storage and secure rendering devices. This also requires that all software applications that run on trusted systems be certified to be trusted. While building tamper-proof trusted systems is still a real challenge to existing technologies, current market trends suggest that open and untrusted systems such as PC's and workstations will be the dominant systems used to access copyrighted documents. In this sense, existing computing environments such as PC's and workstations equipped with popular operating systems (e.g., Windows and UNIX) and render applications (e.g., Microsoft Word) are not trusted systems and cannot be made trusted without significantly altering their architectures.
Accordingly, although certain trusted components can be deployed, one must continue to rely upon various unknown and untrusted elements and systems. On such systems, even if they are expected to be secure, unanticipated bugs and weaknesses are frequently found and exploited.
One particular issue arises in the context of document distribution, as described generally above. In the traditional model of document distribution, the content author and the publisher typically do not handle distribution; a separate party with distribution expertise is given that responsibility. Furthermore, while it is possible to encrypt a document (using standard techniques) so that multiple recipients can decrypt it, it is not usually known at the time a work is created who the ultimate users will be. It makes more sense for the distributor to determine who the end users will be, and to distribute the document to them as desired. If, as in traditional model, the original work of authorship is sent to a publisher and a distributor in the clear, that is a point of vulnerability for the work.
A similar problem arises in office settings, for example, in which it is frequently desirable to designate what is variously called a document agent, surrogate, or delegate. In this situation, it is often useful to be able to give an administrative assistant or secretary the right to decrypt certain document not intended directly for that person.
Considering the problem more broadly, in a networked environment, messages are often passed to recipients other than their initially intended ones. When message confidentiality is a concern and encrypted messages are forwarded, it is very desirable to allow one to decrypt these messages on behalf of another. To be concrete, suppose that Bob is the one who needs to read some message that is initially encrypted for Alice. One trivial solution is that Alice simply reveals her decryption key to Bob so that Bob can use it to decrypt the message himself. This requires Alice to trust Bob totally, which may not be acceptable to Alice. Another way to accomplish this task is to let Alice first decrypt the message, then re-encrypt it for Bob and finally send the newly encrypted message to Bob so that he can decrypt. Though the message is communicated securely, this solution is less efficient as it requires two decryption and one encryption operations in order for Bob to obtain the message. More importantly, in some situations such re-encryption solution is not even applicable or desirable. For example, Alice may not have access to the encrypted message, as it may be sent by its originator directly to Bob for communication efficiency and other considerations. Also, decrypting the encrypted message to a clear version, even if only for a short time, can be a substantial vulnerability.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have an encryption/decryption framework that supports the ability to transfer the right to decode messages. Such a framework would allow a delegate to, essentially, authorize the re-encryption of a message for another party's use without first decrypting the original message. It would also be useful for this to be possible without the delegate ever having possession of the encrypted message.